S.Rajam’s (Music Appreciation notes)

Friday, 8 December 2017

Amir Khan and the South I

By Thomas W. Ross

Rāga

In The Sword and the Flute, an exquisite documentary on
Indian culture told entirely with miniature paintings, the court and the temple
offer clashing views of human experience. The dominance of the 16th-century
Muslim Mughal emperor, Akbar, adopts a symbiosis with the Hindu Rajputs that is
evident in Indian music even today. The lighter-skinned potentate stands
respectfully while hearing the great Tansen sing songs that depict the cowherd
girls sporting with a dark, flute-wielding god, Krishna himself. Thus the
ascetic meets the worldly in a rich mulligatawny brew.

That courtly Northern master, Amir Khan, was in a similar
stance to the Southern Balasaraswati family style. It was a case of mutual
admiration, and Khansaheb always stayed with Bala when he had a concert in
Madras. One could hazard that two minorities, the Muslim and the devadāsī
temple dancer caste, were equally challenged to excel. Khansaheb’s father
didn’t let him perform in public until he was 30; Bala’s and Viswa’s (T
Viswanathan) performances, stellar though they might have been, were met only
with fault-finding from their mother Jayammal.

The dynamic of North/South borrowing today retains the
Mughal/Rajput imbalance: There are numerous examples of Carnatic musicians
doing credible and even excellent renditions in the Hindustani style, but the
reverse is not true.

Amir Khan, however, was an alert witness to the depth in
the Balasaraswati style, where some of the most inventive and profound music
could happen in friendly competition between Bala and Viswa while sitting
around preparing the evening meal. Because Bala engaged even me in lick-trading
at her house, it’s hard to imagine musical exchanges not arising with some
frequency, on an Olympian level, between herself, Viswa, and Khansahab during
his stays.

From the get-go Amir Khan diverged. He learned sāraṅgī
from his father before settling on singing. He introduced a super-slow version
of tālas for the dhrupad-like development of his slow khayāls. And he
appropriated rāgas and rhythmic concepts from Carnatic music. I think these
came especially from the family of Balasaraswati.

Without a gecko on the wall, we can only guess at the
specific nature of Amir Khan’s musical exchanges with Bala and her family when
he stayed with them in Madras. He surely kept his own twice-daily riyāz
routine, as he did with me in my Calcutta flat. I remember the house scene in
Madras as rāga- and tala-soaked, continually.

Here I’m thinking about Ranganathan, Bala’s brother and
one of my first Indian teachers at Wesleyan. In addition to the special skills
needed to accompany dance, like any good mṛidaṅgam player Ranga never stopped
figuring out pieces, at or away from the instrument. In his final days,
bed-ridden, he seemed to do nothing but. At odd hours, he’d call up old
students like me:

Tom. This one’s in Khanda [5 beats]. Do
you have a pencil and paper? Any number fits in this piece. They won’t get it
because it’s anti-dramatic. [By “they” he meant the general Indian audience.]

Two people are talking. At each exchange, the first
person (A) keeps his speed, while the second (B) talks slower. So it’s

A: x.

B: x.

A: x.

B: 2x. [Twice as slow]

A: x.

B: 4x. [Four times as slow]

This gives you 10 exes, so everything fits in five beats,
regardless of the value of x. So for the tisra (3) version of this ingenious
little piece (spoken simply as ta ki ta),

you’d have:

A: (3) ta ki ta

B: (3) ta ki ta

A: (3) ta ki ta

B: (6) ta - ki - ta -

A: (3) ta ki ta

B: (12) ta - - - ki - - - ta - - -

which gives 30, a multiple of 5. Try it with 4, 7, 9 . .
. they all work!

Wow. I’m not a math person, but this is elegance itself.
It’s really a paradigm for making more pieces, itself a model modularity.

Although Bala refrained from improvised swaras in
performance (“too unladylike”!), the entire family were rhythm whizzes, and
it’s very likely that such pieces as Ranga’s were aired while Amir Khan was a
guest. In a rare interview, Khansaheb speaks of his rhythmic approach in the dhrut
(quick) sections of his music. Without acknowledging the devadāsī family
specifically, he rattles off the classic Carnatic jatis (in the traditional
order!): chatusra, tisra, misra, khanda, and sankirna,
4, 3, 7, 5, and 9.

Amir Khan was of course also a master of North Indian
rhythmic approaches. There was, for instance, a legendary exchange of
sophisticated pieces one evening between him and the great tablist Ahmedjan
Thirakwa. But he obviously benefited from his stays with perhaps the most
eminent music and dance family of the South. (To be continued)